Chapter I: Sicily (2)

Philip was firmly convinced that the Inquisition was essential to keep Sicily in subjection, which accounts for his upholding it against his own representatives, but his eyes were somewhat opened by another case which was in progress at the same time. Count Mussumelli, a familiar, was charged with the murder of Giuseppe Bajola, fiscal of the Gran Corte; he was claimed by the Inquisition and took refuge in its prison. From this the Count of Alva took him forcibly, whereupon the inquisitors excommunicated the subordinates concerned in the act and, finding this ineffective, on April 6, 1590, they not only laid an interdict on the whole city, but stretched their jurisdiction by prohibiting all vessels from leaving the port. This brought Alba to terms; Mussumelli was restored to the inquisitorial prison and the interdict was lifted.[66] The case was necessarily carried up to the king and, as usual, was referred to a _junta_ consisting of two members each of the Suprema and of the Council of Italy. To the consulta which they in due course presented, Philip replied, expressing his grief at the atrocious crimes of recent occurrence in Sicily. That of the Count Mussumelli was so aggravated that its impunity would render difficult the enforcement of justice and he must therefore be remitted to the viceroy and judges of the Gran Corte. As for the Count of Rocalmuto and the Marquis of la Rochela, they were to be left to the Inquisition, in full confidence that their punishment would correspond to the enormity of their offences, for which he charged the inquisitor-general and Suprema. Moreover, to prevent such occurrences for the future, he decreed that the crime of assassination should be excepted from the immunity enjoyed by familiars and should not be made the subject of competencias. In addition to this, he proceeded to state that experience had shown the great troubles and scandals arising from nobles being officials and familiars--positions which they sought, not to discharge their duties but to commit crimes under the protection of the Inquisition, thus creating many quarrels between the jurisdictions to the discredit of both, to scandal of the people and hindrance of justice. It would therefore be well for the inquisitor-general and Suprema to order that Sicilian nobles be no longer appointed as officials and familiars and that existing appointments be called in and revoked, for he had resolved to order the viceroys and judges to hold that they are not entitled to the fuero of the Inquisition. It was unreasonable that so holy a business should serve as a cover for delinquents and evil-doers and there was ample experience that this was their sole object in seeking these positions, so that he greatly wondered that the Inquisition should persist in a course so damaging to its reputation and so foreign to the object of its foundation.[67]

Such rebuke and such action could only have been elicited from a monarch like Philip II by a profound conviction of the unbearable abuses of inquisitorial jurisdiction. He would more wisely have followed the example of his father in suspending wholly that jurisdiction, for the tribunal continued to exercise it in a manner provocative of continual disturbance. At length, in 1595, a junta or conference was formed, consisting of two members of the Suprema, Doctors Juan de Zuñiga and Caldas, and two regents of the Gran Corte, Bruñol and Escudero, to reach, if possible, an agreement that should lead to peace. There were many discussions and tentative attempts which finally resulted in a consulta presented to Philip as a compromise acceptable to both sides. This commences by stating that the special cases in dispute had been settled or laid aside, awaiting further documents, and that for the future it had been agreed that the Concordia of 1580 should be observed with certain amendments. The Inquisition was not to protect officials or familiars guilty of treason against the viceroy or his counsellors, of assassination, of shooting from ambush, of insulting, wounding or killing any one in presence of judges of the Gran Corte or Real Patrimonio. It was the same with familiars who were notaries and committed frauds in that capacity, or were warehousemen and adulterated commodities stored with them, or dealers in provisions who used false weights, or bankers or other debtors delinquent to the Real Patrimonio, or delinquent taxpayers in general. Widows of officials were to enjoy the fuero only so long as they remained unmarried, and servants were only to be entitled to it when they were really part of the household and not merely serving for food and wages, concerning which inquisitors were strictly enjoined not to commit frauds. In Palermo and its suburbs the number of familiars was limited to one hundred; in towns of sixty hearths, to one; in other places the Suprema was to decide; they were to be prohibited from carrying guns in the country and fire-arms of any kind in the cities. If a judge arrested a familiar or official, he was at once to send the papers in the case to the inquisitors that they might see whether it was excepted or whether there should be a competencia and, in the latter case, the judges were to be invited courteously to meet them and not be summoned as inferiors. The judges, when excommunicated, were to apply for absolution and not refuse as heretofore to do so, thus discrediting inquisitorial censures, but the viceroy was not to be excommunicated without the assent of the inquisitor-general. The Regent Bruñol argued earnestly in favor of including rape among the excepted crimes, pointing out how provocative it was of assassination, when the husband of a woman thus injured saw the culprit walking the streets unpunished, and he seems to have succeeded in getting it added to the scanty list of those which the Inquisition would permit to be dealt with in the secular courts.[68]

Thus far the conferees agreed, but they differed on the exclusion of nobles from official position. The members of the Suprema represented to the king that, since he had ordered their removal, the Inquisition had fallen greatly in public estimation and found much difficulty in making arrests; therefore they asked that there might be thirty, who would always be selected from the most quiet and peaceable; otherwise the tribunal would be confined to men of low extraction, who could not make arrests. To this the regents replied that the maintenance of the royal order was the only means of keeping the nobles and barons obedient to the viceroy; in Sicily more than elsewhere this was necessary and without it matters would be worse than before, when the tribunal excommunicated the viceroy in the affair of Count Mussumelli; heresy was unknown, the nobles and barons had never made an arrest and they obtained the positions solely to gain the privileges.[69] These arguments were unanswerable and the prohibition was maintained. With the accession of Philip III an attempt was again made to have it repealed; Inquisitor Páramo, in a letter of March 8, 1600, to the new king described the condition of the tribunal as most deplorable in consequence of it, but the appeal was unsuccessful. Philip contented himself with secret instructions to the viceroy to enforce the cédula of January 18, 1535, and the Concordia and to endeavor to come to some understanding with the inquisitors.[70]

So far, indeed, was the Inquisition from being oppressed, that it was seeking to assert exclusive claim to the obedience of its “subjects,” as though they were released in all things from the control of the civil authorities. Thus, in 1591, the tribunal issued an edict condemning all its “subjects” who had not revealed the amount of corn possessed by them or had sold it at unlawful prices--evidently referring to certain measures taken by the government, as was frequently done in times of scarcity. The Viceroy Alba was quick to recognize this attempt to supplant the civil power and he stopped the publication of the edict. He was soon afterwards succeeded by Count Olivares, whose temper Inquisitor Páramo, with characteristic pertinacity, proceeded to test with a proclamation of April 23, 1592, published throughout the island to sound of trumpet, reciting the disturbance of public order by bands of robbers, against whom and all harboring or favoring them the viceroy had issued edicts, wherefore he summoned all those subject to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition to abstain from sheltering the said bandits, under the penalties provided by the laws and of a thousand ounces applicable to the Holy Office. Olivares was no more disposed than his predecessor to admit that his actions required inquisitorial confirmation and, on May 30th, he issued an edict prohibiting, under heavy penalties, the publication of the proclamation; if, in any place, it had been entered on the records of the magistrates, the entry was to be erased and no similar orders of the Inquisition were to be received in future. He moreover told the inquisitors that it was none of their business to issue decrees on this or any other matter of general policy, but simply to obey the laws; that it had been done merely to enlarge their jurisdiction illegally and that the government could not be divided into two heads with one body.[71]

Between conflicting pretensions such as these, harmony was impossible and the conclusions of the junta of 1595 did not restore it. Collisions were frequent and the extremes to which they were sometimes carried are seen in one occurring in 1602, when the Gran Corte prosecuted Mariano Agliata, a familiar, for the murder of Don Diego de Zúñiga and Don Diego Sandoval, a captain and a sergeant of the royal troops. The inquisitors arrested him and claimed jurisdiction and, when the Gran Corte refused to abandon the prosecution, they excommunicated the judges. Excommunication by an inquisitor could be removed only by the power which fulminated it or by the pope, but the viceroy, the Duke of Feria, persuaded the archbishop, Diego de Haëdo, to absolve the judges, whereupon the inquisitors interdicted him from performing any functions until he should admit that his absolutions were invalid. At this the viceroy lost his temper and despatched, August 7th, two companies of soldiers to the Inquisition, with a gallows and the executioner. They remained in front of the building until two o’clock in the morning and returned on the 8th in greater force, erected six gallows, each with its hangman, and stood with lighted matchlocks pointed at the windows. The inquisitors were not daunted by this impotent display of force; they barred the doors, hoisted the standard of the Inquisition, with a papal flag and a crucifix, and flung out of the windows among the troops notices of excommunication. Undeterred by this, the Spaniards broke their way in and, after some parley, the inquisitors promised to absolve them. Feria had gone as far as he dared without result and the victory remained with the inquisitors, for the case of Agliata was surrendered to them, on their removing the interdict on the archbishop and the excommunication of the judges.[72] To emphasize Feria’s defeat, Philip III, in 1603, issued a general letter to all of his viceroys, lauding the services of the Inquisition and ordering them to give it all the favor and assistance it might ask for, and to maintain intact the privileges, exemptions and liberties, assured to its ministers and familiars, by law, by the concordias, by the royal cédulas, by use and custom and by any other source.[73]

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As though these sempiternal conflicts with the civil authorities were not sufficiently disturbing to the public peace, the Inquisition was involved in a similar series with the bishops, in which it did not fare so well, entrenched as they were behind the canon law, which the monarchs could not set aside. A portion of the officials of the Holy Office were clerics, of whose immunity from the secular courts there could be no question, but the bishops claimed, under divine and canon law, an imprescriptible right of cognizance of their offences, when these did not concern the faith or their official functions. The inquisitors held that they possessed exclusive jurisdiction over their subordinates and the conflict was waged with abundant lack of Christian charity, causing great popular scandal until, as we are told, the people were in the habit of asking where was the God of the clergy. The contest raged chiefly over the commissioners appointed everywhere throughout the island, whose duty it was to investigate cases of heresy in their districts and report or, if necessary, make arrests and send the culprits to Palermo for trial. In 1625 the Suprema endeavored to effect a compromise, by designating what offences were cognizable by the bishops exclusively, what by the inquisitors and what cumulatively by either jurisdiction, for that of the bishops could not be denied and the Inquisition had no papal letters to show in support of its claims. This seems only to have emboldened the bishops and the quarrels continued. In 1630 Philip IV and the inquisitor-general wrote to the viceroy and the inquisitors, enquiring what was the established custom in such cases, but apparently the two ecclesiastical camps could not agree on terms of peace and nothing was done. In 1642 the inquisitor, Gonsalvo Bravo Grosero submitted to the Suprema a long and learned paper in which he describes the condition of the Sicilian Inquisition as most deplorable, in consequence of the implacable hostility of the bishops. It could not possibly do without commissioners, for the inquisitors could not travel around to visit the provinces; the roads were too bad and their salaries too meagre to bear the expense, as they could not venture into the country without a guard of at least forty men, in view of the robbers and bandits. There was not money to pay the commissioners a salary and their only inducement to accept the office was to gain immunity from episcopal jurisdiction. As this was virtually denied to them, it became impossible to find fitting clerics to undertake the duties, so there were many vacancies that could not be filled.

Grosero evidently did not pause to consider the reflection cast on the character of the clerics thus anxious to find refuge in the Inquisition from the courts of their bishops, but the cases which he mentions, if not exaggerated, testify amply to the virulence of episcopal vindictiveness. Recently, he says, the tribunal became involved in a quarrel with the Bishop of Syracuse over the case of a familiar. Indignant at its methods, the bishop indulged in reprisals on the unlucky commissioner of Lentini, on a charge of incontinence; he was seized by a band of armed clerics, stripped and carried on a mule to prison as a malefactor and cast into a dungeon where he lay, deprived of all communication with his friends, until the Bishop of Cefalù, then governor of the island, procured his release, but his persecution continued for two years. So the Bishop of Girgenti seized the commissioner of Caltanexeda because he had, under orders from the tribunal, stopped the prosecution of a familiar. He was confined in a damp, underground cell for forty days, until the viceroy procured his release, and his unwholesome confinement nearly cost him his life. The impelling cause of Grosero’s memorial was a pending case, which scarcely evokes sympathy with his complaints. Alessandro Turano, commissioner of Burgio, had given refuge in his house to a kinsman, a monk guilty of murder, and had refused admission to the officers who came to arrest the criminal. For this the Bishop of Girgenti was prosecuting him, and Grosero appeals to the Suprema to intervene and put an end to such violations of the immunity necessary to enable the Inquisition to perform its pious work.[74] It is not likely that the Suprema succeeded in establishing concord between the irreconcilable pretensions of the two ecclesiastical bodies, but the struggle is worth passing attention as affording a glimpse into the social conditions of the period under such institutions.

* * * * *

Meanwhile the incessant bickering with the civil authorities continued as active and as bitter as ever. No attention was paid to the limitations prescribed in the Concordias, or to the protests of the viceroys until, in 1635, an attempt was made, in a new Concordia, to remedy some of the more crying evils by empowering the viceroy, in cases of exceptional gravity, to banish criminal officials, after notice to the senior inquisitor, so that he might appeal to Madrid, and in these cases the inquisitors were forbidden to excommunicate the officers of justice.[75] Slender as was this concession, the inquisitors, in a letter of April 26, 1652, to the Suprema, did not hesitate to assert that the exemptions of the officials were reduced to those of the vilest plebeians and that their revenue suffered heavily through the limitation of their jurisdiction and the great reduction in the number of those who applied for appointments.[76] On the other hand, if we may believe the _Consulta Magna_, drawn up, in 1696, by a special junta composed of representatives of all the royal councils except the Suprema, the Sicilian tribunal paid no respect whatever to the Concordias, held itself as wholly independent of all rules and enforced its arbitrary acts by the constant abuse of excommunication, which rendered the condition of the island most deplorable. The inquisitors refused to meet the judges in competencias on disputed cases and though, by the Concordia of 1635, such refusal incurred a fine of five hundred ducats for a first offence and dismissal for a second, yet as the enforcement of this required the issue by the Suprema of a commission to the Council of Italy, it was easily eluded. As a matter of course the suggestion of the junta was ineffective that those oppressed by the abuse of spiritual censures should have the right of appeal to the royal judges.[77]

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These quarrels and the exercise of its widely extended temporal jurisdiction by no means distracted wholly the tribunal from its legitimate functions of preserving the purity of the faith. In 1640 it held a notable auto de fe in which one case is worth alluding to as an illustration of inquisitorial dealings with the insane. Carlo Tabaloro of Calabria was an Augustinian lay-brother, who had conceived the idea that he was the Son of God and the Messiah, Christ having been merely the Redeemer. He had written a gospel about himself and framed a series of novel religious observances. Arrested by the Palermo tribunal, in 1635, he had imagined it to be for the purpose of enabling him to convert the inquisitors and through them the people. For five years the theologians labored to disabuse him, but to no purpose; he was condemned as an obstinate and pertinacious heretic and was led forth in the auto of 1640 to be burnt alive. On his way to the stake he still expected that torrents of rain would extinguish the fires, but finding himself disappointed and shrinking from the awful death, at the last moment he professed conversion and was mercifully strangled before the pile was lighted.[78] At another auto, June 2, 1647, there were thirty-four penitents and six months later another, January 12, 1648, with thirty-seven, followed, December 13th of the same year, by one with forty-three. January 22, 1651, there was another with thirty-nine, honored moreover with the presence of Don John of Austria, fresh from the triumph of suppressing the Neapolitan revolt of Masaniello. In fact, in a letter of April 26, 1652, the inquisitors boasted that they had punished two hundred and seven culprits in public autos, besides nearly as many who had been despatched privately in the audience chamber. This would show an average of about eighty cases a year, greatly more than at this time was customary in Spain. The offences were mostly blasphemy, bigamy and sorcery, with an occasional Protestant or Alumbrado, the Judaizers by this time having almost disappeared.[79] The position of inquisitor was not wholly without danger, for Juan López de Cisneros died of a wound in the forehead inflicted by Fray Diego la Mattina, a prisoner whom he was visiting in his cell and who was burnt alive in the auto of March 17, 1658.[80] The activity of the tribunal must at times have brought in considerable profits for, in 1640, we happen to learn that it was contributing yearly twenty-four thousand reales in silver to the Suprema and not long afterwards it was called upon to send five hundred ducats, _plata doble_, to that of Majorca, which had been impoverished by a pestilence. Still these gains were fluctuating and the demands on the tribunal seem to have brought it into financial straits, from which the Suprema sought to relieve it by an appeal, August 6, 1652, to Philip IV, to grant it benefices to the amount of twenty-five hundred ducats a year.[81]

The treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, gave Sicily to Savoy, but the Inquisition remained Spanish and nominally subject to the Suprema. There was, however, an immediate change of personnel, for we find the inquisitor, José de la Rosa Cozio, early in 1714, taking refuge in Spain and billeted upon the tribunal of Valencia.[82] When, in 1718, Savoy exchanged Sicily with Austria for Sardinia, the Emperor Charles VI would not endure this dependence of the tribunal upon a foreign power and procured, in 1720, from Clement XI a brief transferring the supremacy to Vienna. In accordance, however, with the persistent Hapsburg claims on the crown of Spain, the Inquisition remained Spanish. A supreme council for it was created in Vienna, with Juan Navarro, Bishop of Albarracin as chief who, although resident there gratified himself with the title of _Inquisidor-general de España_, but in 1723 he was succeeded by Cardinal Emeric, Archbishop of Kolocz. Apparently it was deemed necessary to justify this elaborate machinery with a demonstration and, on April 6, 1724, an auto de fe was celebrated at Palermo with great splendor, the expenses being defrayed by the emperor. Twenty-six delinquents were penanced, consisting as usual mostly of cases of blasphemy, bigamy and sorcery, but the spectacle would have been incomplete without concremation and two unfortunates, who had languished in prison since 1699, were brought out for that purpose. They were Geltruda, a beguine, and Fra Romualdo, a friar, accused of Quietism and Molinism, with the accompanying heresies of illuminism and impeccability. Their long imprisonment, with torture and ill-usage, seems to have turned their brains, and they had been condemned to relaxation as impenitent in 1705 and 1709, but the sentences had never been carried out and they were now brought from their dungeons and burnt alive.[83] Less notable was an auto de fe of March 22, 1732, in which Antonio Canzoneri was burnt alive as a contumacious and relapsed heretic.[84]

Although the zeal of Charles VI led to increased activity of the tribunal in matters of faith, he was little disposed to tolerate its abuse of its temporal jurisdiction, which had led to so many fruitless remonstrances under Spanish domination. In letters of January 26, 1729, to his viceroy the Count of Sástago, he recites the complaints made to him, by the English factory, that foreign merchants were exposed to constant frauds by bankruptcies of debtors who claimed the forum of the Inquisition or of the Santa Cruzada, where creditors could get no justice or even ascertain whether the bankruptcies were fictitious or not. The emperor therefore orders that in future the Concordias shall be strictly construed and rigidly adhered to; that if the inquisitors proceed by excommunication they shall experience the effect of “los remedios económicos” (presumably the suspension of their emoluments) and that in future all mercantile cases, whether civil or criminal, shall not be entitled to the forum of the Inquisition--all of which was duly proclaimed by the viceroy in an edict of March 17th. At the same time the legal functionaries were required to investigate the whole subject and report what further measures might be essential to prevent interference with the course of justice. The result of their labors is embodied in a Pragmatic Sanction of May 12, 1732, consisting of eleven articles, whereby it was ordered that the inquisitorial forum should not include exemption from military service and taxes; that widows of stipendiary officials should enjoy the forum only during widowhood; that the privilege of bearing arms should be exercised only when in actual service of the Inquisition; that commissions as messengers should not be given to shipmasters; nobles holding fiefs were not to be enrolled as familiars; the forum was not to exempt from serving in onerous public office and the use of excommunication in cases of impeding jurisdiction was allowed under certain limitations. This latter is explained by a decision of March 6, 1734, on cases in which the inquisitors had excommunicated D. Antonio Crimibela, a judge of the Gran Corte and D. Felipe Venuto, _capitan de justicia_ of Paternò, when it was ordered that excommunications could only be employed in matters of faith and in cases where the secular tribunals had refused the conference preliminary to forming a competencia to decide as to the jurisdiction.[85]

The conquest of the Two Sicilies by Charles III, in 1734, led the inquisitors to imagine that, under a Spanish dynasty, they could reassert their superiority over the law, but they were promptly undeceived. D. Sisto Poidimani, when on trial, recused them for enmity as judges in his case and the Giunta of Presidents recognized his reasons as sufficient, whereupon Viceroy de Castro ordered them, October 2, 1735, to take no further action except to appoint some one to act in their place. To this they demurred and de Castro repeated the order, January 24, 1736, and again on February 19th. Finally, on April 21st he told them that they were actuated, not by reason but by disobedience, and that, if the order was not promptly obeyed, the senior inquisitor must sail, within forty-eight hours, for Naples to render to the king an account of his actions.[86]

The various changes that had occurred rendered the position of the Sicilian tribunal somewhat anomalous and to remedy this the king obtained, in 1738, from Clement XIII the appointment of Pietro Galletti, Bishop of Catania, as inquisitor-general of Sicily, with power to deputize subordinates, who was followed, in 1742, by Giacomo Bonanno, Bishop of Patti, appointed by Benedict XIV.[87] Thus the severance from Spain was perpetuated and it was rendered independent. This seems to have revived its aggressiveness and it assumed that the limitations imposed by the Emperor Charles VI had become obsolete with the change of sovereigns for, in 1739, it endeavored to intervene in the bankruptcy case of Giuseppe Maria Gerardi, who was entitled to its forum, but the attempt was promptly annulled by the Viceroy Corsini. A further blow was inflicted by a decree of July 12, 1746, suppressing the system of competencias, for the settlement of conflicting cases of jurisdiction, and substituting, in all cases not of faith, the decision of the viceroy, who could, in matters of grave importance, refer them to the king.[88] Thus gradually the secular business of the Holy Office was circumscribed; in its spiritual field of activity there were no more burnings, though it occasionally held autos de fe, in which figured mostly women accused of the vulgar arts of sorcery, and in addition it interfered with scholars in its capacity of censor.

The enlightened views of Charles III were not abandoned, when he was summoned to the throne of Spain in 1759, and left that of Naples to his young son, Ferdinando IV, then a child eight years of age. Public opinion in Italy was rapidly rendering the Holy Office an anachronism and Ferdinando only expressed the general sentiment when, by a decree of March 16, 1782, he pronounced its suppression. He gave as a reason that all attempts had failed to make it alter its vicious system, which deprived the accused of legitimate means of defence; he restored to the bishops their original jurisdiction in all matters of faith, but required them to observe the same procedure as the secular courts of justice and to submit to the viceroy for approval all citations to appear, all orders for arrest and all sentences proposed; moreover, he appropriated the property of the Inquisition to continuing for life the salaries of the officials, with a provision that, as these pensions should fall in, the money should be used for the public benefit. The revenues, in fact, amounted to ten thousand crowns a year and eventually they served to found chairs in mathematics and experimental physics and to build an observatory. When the royal officials took possession of the Inquisition, they found only three prisoners to liberate--women accused of witchcraft. A few more had previously been discharged, in anticipation of the suppression, by the inquisitor-general, Salvatore Ventimiglia, Archbishop of Nicodemia.[89]

In its career, since 1487, Franchina, writing in 1744, boasts that the Holy Office had handed over to the secular arm for burning two hundred and one living heretics and apostates and two hundred and seventy-nine effigies of the dead or fugitives.[90] It illustrates forcibly the changed spirit of the age that Viceroy Caraccioli, in writing to D’Alembert an account of the abolition, says that he shed tears of joy in proceeding to the Inquisition with the great dignitaries of State and Church, when he caused the royal rescript to be read to the inquisitor and the arms of the Holy Office to be erased from the portal amid the rejoicing of the assembled people.[91]

MALTA.

Malta, if we may believe Salelles, enjoyed the honor of having St. Paul as the founder of its Inquisition, when he was cast ashore there on his voyage to Rome.[92] In the sixteenth century, however, as a dependency of Sicily, it was under the Sicilian tribunal, which maintained an organization there, under a commissioner.[93] When, in 1530, Charles V gave the island to the Knights of St. John, the Sicilian jurisdiction lapsed but, even without the Holy Office, the Church had efficient machinery for the suppression of heresy. In 1546 a Frenchman named Gesuald was found to have been for ten years infecting the islanders with Calvinist opinions, and the Aragonese Domingo Cubelles, the Bishop of Malta, was at no loss in exercising his episcopal jurisdiction. Gesuald was obstinate in his faith and was duly burnt alive; on his way to the stake he called out “Why do priests hesitate to take wives, since it is lawful?” whereupon Cubelles ordered him to be gagged and he perished in silence. His converts lacked his stubborn convictions and were reconciled--among them two priests who had secretly married their concubines, for which they were condemned to wear the sanbenito. In 1553, the Grand Master, Juan de Omedes, constituted three of the knights and a chaplain as an Inquisition, but there is no trace of their labors and Cubelles continued to exercise his episcopal jurisdiction in several cases during the following years. In 1560, however, when a Maltese, named Doctor Pietro Combo, fell under suspicion, Cubelles seems to have felt uncertain what to do with him and sent him in chains to the Roman Inquisition, where he was acquitted. Cubelles informed the cardinals that the Lutheran heresy was spreading in the island and this probably explains why, by letters of October 21, 1561, the Roman Inquisition, while recognizing the episcopal jurisdiction of Cubelles, enlarged it to that of an inquisitor-general, empowering him to appoint deputies and to proceed against all persons, whether clerics or laymen, to try them, torture them, relax them or reconcile them with appropriate penance.[94]

In his zeal for the effective discharge of his duties, Cubelles sent to Palermo for detailed information as to the conduct of the Inquisition and was furnished with copies of the Spanish instructions and forms. This seems to have provoked the Roman Congregation of the Holy Office, between which and the Spanish there was perpetual jealousy, and it sent to Malta a Dominican to act as his assistant and to direct him. He was succeeded, both as bishop and inquisitor, by Martin Rojas de Portorubio, to whom in 1573 Gregory XIII sent a commission. Apparently it was impossible for the Inquisition to maintain harmonious relations with the temporal power and, already in 1574, he complained to Rome that his officials were beaten and that the Grand Master, Jean l’Evesque de la Cassière, threatened to throw him out of the window if he came to the palace. This created considerable scandal, but Rome, unlike Spain, was not accustomed to support inquisitors through thick and thin, and the result was that, by brief of July 3, 1574, Gregory revoked his commission and sent Dr. Pietro Duzzina as apostolic vicar to conduct the Inquisition. In thus separating it from the episcopate no provision was made for its expenses, but soon after this the confiscated property of Mathieu Faison, a rich heretic burnt in effigy, yielded a revenue of three hundred crowns and, when Bishop Rojas died, March 19, 1577, opportunity was taken to burden the see with a pension of six hundred more for its benefit.[95] It was thus rendered permanent, but a protracted struggle with successive grandmasters was necessary to secure for its officials the privileges of the forum and the immunities and exemptions which they claimed.[96]

Yet the Spanish Inquisition was not satisfied to be thus completely superseded by that of Rome, even in so remote and inconspicuous a spot as Malta. In 1575 Duzzina arrested a man as a heretic; it was known that testimony against him had been taken in Sicily and application for it was made to the inquisitors of Palermo. They applied for instructions to the Suprema, which ordered them not to give it but to claim the prisoner. The result was that the Maltese tribunal tried him on what had occurred on the island and discharged him.[97] This emphasized its absolute separation from the Spanish Holy Office and its history need not be further followed here, except to allude to the most celebrated case in its annals, when the two Quakeresses, Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, moved by the Spirit, went to Malta on a mission of conversion and suffered an imprisonment of four years.[98]